Hi everyone! I’m trying to make a catenary curtain for an non-rigid airship - this is the structure that transfers the load of the gondola to the upper envelope fabric:
For a large airship, there can be dozens or even hundreds of cables and their connecting fabric segments. And since I may be changing the shape of the airship as I go along, I decided to implement them by arraying along a bezier curve. So for the first curtain I first made a mesh that looks like:
Then I arrayed it along a curve and mirrored it:
I then attempted to make the cables by extending the middle tine - but then hit a snag when I got something like:
(Hit the limit of 3 images per post, will continue in a reply)
Here’s what i would do.
-Select edges along balloon where you want curtains and straps to be.
-Place 3d cursor where you want straps to be attached to or a bit lower if you’d want to cut them shorter later (accounting for gondola length). In example this was in between pole vertices (1,2).
-Set Pivot to 3d cursor and extrude, then scale selected vertices - you’ll get planes going to 3d cursor.
-Subdivide once extruded edge and select all newly added vertices; Ctrl-Shift-B bevel vertices, scroll mouse wheel to get additional verts. Make odd number of vertices on each edge.
-Now, select each middle vertex and using Proportional Edit (try Inverse Square) scale back selected vertices. Adjust influence circle as needed to scale only added by beveling vertices. You should end having nice curtain.
Switch off Proportional Edit, select vertices for straps (you could create vertex group right after first extrusion to easily select strap verts)
extrude and scale towards 3d cursor.
Separate edges which represent straps, convert to Curves, add some thickness, convert back to the mesh.
